Ethical Issues in Stopping Randomized Trials Early Because of Apparent Benefit
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stopping randomized trials early because of an apparent benefit is becoming more common. To protect and promote the interests of trial participants, investigators may feel obligated to stop a trial early because of the apparent benefit of a study treatment (compared with placebo or other treatment). There are, however, serious ethical problems with doing so. Truncated trials systematically overestimate treatment effects; in cases where the number of accrued outcome events is small, the overestimation may be very large. Generating seriously inflated estimates of treatment effect violates the ethical research requirement of scientific validity. Subsequent use of inflated estimates to inform clinical decision making and practice guidelines violates the ethical requirements of social value and a favorable risk-benefit ratio. Researchers should ensure that a large number of outcome events accrues before stopping a trial and then continue recruitment to assess whether positive trends continue. This can balance the need to protect research participants with the ethical requirements of scientific validity, social value, and a favorable risk-benefit ratio.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.153 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".